Marc-André Hamelin (piano)
Found Objects/Sound Objects
rec. 2024, St Silas the Martyr, Kentish Town, London; except The perilous night rec. live, 8 February 2013, New World Center, Miami Beach, USA
Hyperion CDA68457 [77]

In his entertaining booklet notes, Marc-André Hamelin writes about the difficulty he had in choosing a title for this album. Somewhat tongue in cheek, he says he rejected ‘World’s Favourite Piano Gems’ as ‘that was already appropriated by Reader’s Digest’. Still, the thought conjures up some lovely possibilities. Imagine the effect it might create on the inadvertent listener for example when ‘Play’ was pressed and Frank Zappa’s Ruth is sleeping emerged from the speakers. Zappa wrote the piece in the early 1980s for an instrument called the Synclavier, an electronic sampling keyboard. There are no recordings of the piece in its original instrumentation, which is a shame. Its first performance of note was at the Yellow Shark series of concerts given by Ensemble Modern in Frankfurt in the early 1990s. Zappa asked Ali N Askin to arrange the work for two pianists to play at those concerts, either at one or two pianos. This is the version recorded here. Zappa sanctioned the work being played by a single pianist, a challenge Hamelin found irresistible, commenting modestly, ‘It’s very demanding, but worth the effort in conquering its hurdles.’  We’re treated to a typically formidable performance where Hamelin seems to be enjoying himself immensely and, importantly, making real musical sense of Zappa’s writing, something that is not to be taken lightly.

Salvatore Martirano’s Stuck on Stella shares some similarities with the Zappa. It’s similarly prone to deviating from its main argument to explore interesting musical ideas, and, like the Zappa, it has some moments of genuine lyricism to set against ostentatiously showy virtuosic writing. Hamelin gives the most lucid version of the piece one’s ever likely to hear, Martirano’s impossible chords being taken in the performer’s stride and made to sound both convincing and essential.

Canadian composer John Oswald’s Tip is essentially a nine-minute collage of around forty pieces of classical, jazz and pop music. Hamelin likens Oswald’s approach to the cut-up novels of William Burroughs, although what the composer has produced is vastly more entertaining. For the most part, this isn’t an obviously ‘splashy’ piece, having a relatively quiet dynamic, its attraction being in recognising the ingeniously woven quotations as they flash by, the tips of an iceberg on the tip of our tongues. It’s a brilliant and engrossing work, perfectly realised here by Hamelin.

John Cage’s Perilous Night could be heard as a collage of a different kind, that of the exciting range of sounds he conjures from the prepared piano. I’m delighted that Hamelin included this performance, recorded live in Florida over ten years earlier than the other works on the disc, at the ‘Making the Right Choices’ festival, a celebration of Cage’s music curated by Michael Tilson Thomas. I don’t know how familiar Hamelin was with Cage before he played the piece, but he sounds completely at home in this oddest of idioms—often the preserve of ‘contemporary’ specialists—and evokes brilliantly the prolonged display of anguish which fuelled the composition, written at a time when Cage was splitting up with his wife Xenia.

Stefan Wolpe’s Passacaglia needs a performer with Hamelin’s vision and ability to bring it to life. Vision to see the musical possibilities in the series derived from the intervals on which Wolfe predicates the work, and the ability to perform them coherently. It would be all too tempting to render as accurately as possible the clusters of notes and lines Wolpe presents and leave it at that, but Hamelin does so much more. He untangles the dense fabric and, in doing so, shows us that there is a clearly navigable path for the performer to take, even in the work’s rather relentless and hugely daunting long final section. The music really does come alive here in Hamelin’s hands in the most thrilling way.

I found Yehudi Wyner’s Refrain the most revelatory of all the works in the recital. What strikes one first is its harmonic language, which gives rise to an endless series of frequently changing flashes of colour, whose progression has a pleasing inexorability. Set alongside that is the repeated presentation of the opening material—the ‘refrain of the title—so that throughout one is hearing material that is both familiar and strangely different. It’s highly effective, indeed fascinating writing, wonderfully performed here, Hamelin relishing how well Wyner writes for his instrument.

In the parallel universe where albums of ‘contemporary’ piano music are a big deal commercially, eagerly awaited by the public at large, Hamelin’s own Hexensabbat would be the single that was released first. It’s a riot. Taking Berlioz’s ‘Ronde du sabbat’ from the Symphonie fantastique as its starting point, it disassembles it, adds a set of cutting-edge harmonic techniques and then presents the material in a way that is apparently impossible for mere mortals even to contemplate playing. To give one example, as the piece reaches its climax, Hamelin decides it would be amusing for the pianist to tackle three versions of the Dies irae proceeding at different speeds. They portend a cataclysmic post-virtuosic ending which has to be heard to be believed. In retrospect, it feels like the only way Hamelin could have concluded this stupendous recital.

To go back to the beginning, the title Hamelin eventually chose for the disc is, he says, a reflection on the pleasure of the initial discovery of the pieces, something that was intensified by the very different sound worlds of each. As listeners, we’re able to make those discoveries too and are the richer for it. Huge credit to Hamelin for his curation and, of course, execution of this selection and to Hyperion for backing it. I note that in our own universe, the disc is currently sixth in the UK classical charts, welcome proof that challenging music can be widely enjoyed as long as we have communicators with Hamelin’s amazing gifts.     

Dominic Hartley

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Contents
Frank Zappa (1940 –1993)
Ruth is sleeping (1982/83)
Salvatore Martirano (1927-1995)
Stuck on Stella (1979)
John Oswald (b. 1953)
Tip (2021)
John Cage (1912 –1992)
The perilous night (1944)
Stefan Wolpe (1902 –1972)
Passacaglia (1936, rev. 1971)
Yehudi Wyner (b. 1929)
Refrain (2012)
Marc-André Hamelin (b. 1961)
Hexensabbat (2023)